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User blog:Scubadave/Japan Tsunami
Ican't keep quiet about this anymore. This weekend there was a huge earthquake in Japan. 8.9 on the Ricter scale. Everything was shaken to the core. The earthquake caused a tsunami to add insult to injury, here a report from The Telegraph, a british Newspaper =Japan tsunami: grim tide of death as 2,000 bodies wash up on the shores= Night is falling on the tsunami-swept coast of Sendai when the stillness of the dusk is pierced by the sound of a whistle – three quick-short blasts that ought to denote some kind of hope or life-saving urgency, but now announce only the discovery of yet another body. Sendai before, left, and after the Tsunami struck, right Photo: AP By Peter Foster, Sendai 9:00PM GMT 14 Mar 2011 The search teams are visibly weary after a long day combing the deluged aprons of Sendai's airport, but the summons of their colleague animates them one more time. A tarpaulin is fetched; a canvas stretcher unfurled and, lastly, a polythene body-bag produced to heft the bloated remains away with what little dignity time and circumstance allows. It is now four nights since a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered the tsunami that swept through this town in northeast Japan, destroying its airport in a moment that was captured in a dramatic piece of video that was broadcast around the world. All day on Monday the teams of masked workers in rubber boots and plastic over-trousers poked and prodded at the debris with wooden staves; divining for dead bodies buried in the tight-packed debris that has been glued together with stinking, sandy sludge. It is desperate work sifting the wreckage. This latest find is in the car park of the airport's School of Aviation where mounds of bristling flotsam have collected, funnelled in by the flood that carried planes and basketballs, cars and styrofoam coffee cups with equal ease. The searching is made more difficult because the detritus gathered by the wave as it swept inland has become deeply compacted, piling up in two-storey heaps against anything strong enough to resist it: the gable-end of buildings, perimeter fences or rail and road embankments.Such was the force of the wave that in one place on Sendai's coastal motorway a small Toyota car has been driven into the earth like a nail, sticking nose-first into the embankment with only its boot and passenger-doors still visible. "The force was unimaginable, how can you put it into words," said 70-year-old Kan Kichi who had come to survey the wreckage, "we had a big earth quake about 40 years ago, but nothing like this. I used to come here to fish: it was such a mild, agreeable place." Japan now officially estimates that at least 10,000 people were killed by the tsunami, but if yesterday's work at the airport is even partially representative, then that number could turn out to be a very conservative estimate. Sho Oji, the sergeant managing the platoon of searchers at the airport's School of Aviation said that 1,000 bodies been recovered from Sendai airport district. "The bodies have just been too numerous," he said, "I am not supposed to say, but it is a thousand from around here alone." Reports based on local officials' estimates now suggested that 10,000 people have died in the Miyagi prefecture – of which Sendai is the main town – alone. Some 2,000 bodies have already been found on the shores Ishinomaki and in Minamisanriku, a small town place with a population of 17,000, local authorities report another 10,000 as missing. Already local radio is reporting that the government is struggling to deal with numbers of corpses. Another town, Rikuzentakata, with a population of 23,000 people, was "almost completely wiped out", the local fire department said, with more than 80 per cent of the city flooded while in Otsuchi, out of a population of 15,000 people, 12,000 people are missing. Driving along the coast, these numbers are not hard to believe. The authorities are doing their best, but the sheer scale of the task that confronts them along nearly 300 miles of coastline is as vast and difficult to conceive as the wave itself. All day long blaring ambulances shuttled up and down the coastal highway picking up the remains of the dead as they were disentangled, sometimes piece by piece, from the rubbish. The sirens that used to speak of urgency, now signal only despair. And Here's a video thumb|300px|left|Entire Houses were Swept away! Google even made an app to find people by name and see ifthere is any info on them http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/ Delete this if you have the heart to, I just had to get it out, those poor people... Category:Blog posts